I have a strange but positive issue with the cucubrita family. This family includes pumpkins, squash, zucchini, cucumbers etc.
You see, I grow a lot of them, cook and eat them, and also pressure can and preserve those that I cannot eat in time. In the process, I cut and clean them before cooking or canning. I separate the seeds and preserve them. But, a few seeds escape the separation, or are knowingly discarded because they appear thin or somehow unappealing. So, all these left over seeds end up with the pulp and often into my vermicompost bin. A few times, it gets recycled by going out from the bin on to my garden beds. A few times the composted soil containing the bins spill over and land outside of vegetable beds.
What is interesting, is that much of these seeds remain alive and viable. So, at the right time in the season, they suddenly sprout, in unexpected places. How unexpected? Well, they crop up on the ground in my backyard, or in corners of vegetable beds designed for other plants such as tomatoes. They even sprout inside my vermicompost bin.
Since they produce food – dense and nutritious food, and I like them, I do not like to kill these suddenly appeared sprouts. Given a chance I transplant them to a proper bed, or try to let them grow right on the ground, if it is not in my walk path.
One that grew on the ground next to my vegeie beds
Now, the thing is, all these cucubrita plants looks somewhat similar when they first sprout. Their primary leaves that point down while pushing through the soil by their “shoulder”, usually yellow in colour, looks nearly indistinguishable, except perhaps in their size. For example, a cucumber seed is similar shaped but smaller, so the original sprouted leaves are also smaller. So, I usually do not know what kind of plant this will be, within the family. But by the time secondary leaves come out and starts growing, the distinctions appears. Each of these leaves have their own unique pattern. I can more or less identify proper pumpkins, although there are way too many varieties within pumpkins themselves. Then there are the squash varieties, a huge diversified group. Then there are gourds, cucumbers etc.
Sometimes I just don’t know and cannot guess that kind of a cucubrita this one will be, partly because we also get hybrids that did not exist in my garden before and I am not particularly aware of the types.
Radish, also called Chinese Moolah in India, is a prized root vegetable for many of us.
I have been saving some seeds of this plant from my garden. But same time, someone or something was eating up parts of the seeds. I did not know who or what it was, till I managed to catch the thief in my camera. It was a bunch of purple finches.
I did not mind too much, since I had already saved quite a few of them and did not need many more.
Back to the finches – it is not unusual to mix up purple finches with house finches, since the two look so similar.
Points to remember are – house finches are not normally fund near houses per se, and purple finches are not purple. In fact, the best way to distinguish them is to remember that house finches are present all across North America while purple finches nest only in Canada. Also, purple finches have far more read on their body and far deeper red too.
To further confuse the issue, there is a third look alike – the Cassin’s finch, that is also tossed into the mix.
Anyhow, these are the birds, like sparrows, that belong to the finch group with specialised bills to cross seeds, their primary source of food. And a bunch of them have discovered by daikon radish finches in my garden.
This is the first time I succeeded in germinating cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli from seeds in numbers, and same time managed to grow them to big size without pest attack. The pest attack issue was so serious that I had almost given up on them. But finally I learned to rig taken copper wires along my raised beds, attached to a 9V battery, causing an electrical barrier to slugs, and same time designing giant mosquito nets to prevent moths from laying eggs on the leaves.
This resulted in me getting a great harvest as the vegetables got really big and strong. The bed itself has unique soil combination – wood at bottom, leaves and grass mulch above it, and finally a relatively thinner layer of soil and compost. No artificial chemical, no industrial fertiliser or pesticide.
Initially, I had a mosquito net that was smaller and hanging off ropes. Which I later modified to be taller, more robust with a wooden frame.
The experiment did give me great cauliflowers and cabbage.
I have harvested all the cauliflowers and one cabbage so far. I took a good look at them and investigated their leaves etc. I noted presence of small colonies of aphid eggs and pupae, but all dead. None were apparently able to penetrate the skin of the leaves or puncture the veins and suck the juice of of the leaves, weakening the plant, which would result in relatively stunted growth.
But that did not happen. The aphids and pupae were all dead, without being able to hurt the plant much.
The question was – why?
Some folks use spray solution of Neem oil and water, or detergent and water. I did not use any.
Some use insecticides. I never use them since these would not only kill the insect, the poison would get into the vegetable and eventually into us.
Some plant beneficial plants that either attract the aphids, thus sparing my vegetables, or are so repugnant that they keep aphids away from my plants. I have planted neither kind near or far from my vegetables.
So why did the aphids not manage to lay eggs in many places, and why did these few that did land up on the underside of a few cabbage leaves, did not succeed in causing much harm?
I do not know the answer, but I suspect I was helped by beneficial insects, that like to lunch on this aphid eggs and pupae. I know I have a huge colony of all kinds of insects in my garden, most of these are unknown species to me. I knew the greater ecosystem needs all these to exist and interact with each other, and some of them are harmful to some others. I was not interested in killing any of them unless I knew some where harming my vegetables.
It is my belief that this insect world in my garden did include some unidentified beneficial insects that kept the aphids in check. I now believe that insecticides etc cause more harm to the insect ecosystem, and harmful insects such as aphids learn to survive or sidestep these poisons better than other beneficial insects. Therefore not using poisons and keeping the garden healthy and organic, has a curious side benefit – indirectly keeping my vegetables protected – not unlike our own microbiome bolstering our own immunity.
At least, this is what I think is the reason why I managed to have giant cabbages and cauliflower without using any insect killer.
I have a low powered microscope, or rather, an endoscope, that can be plugged into my hand phone, which can capture the electronic image output from the scope and save it in the phone itself.
So I decided to share some of these images here with the external world.
The surface of my MacBook laptop (Aluminum)Himalayan pink saltVelcro stripPerennial wildflower seeds I am saving for future usePotato seeds – no kiddingDaikon Radish (moolah – মূলা) seedsTurnip seedsCarrot seedsBeet seed
I have been growing vegetable not just in my backyard, but also on my front yard. The message and motto has been – GROW FOOD, NOT LAWNS.
So, I had a patch of the front yard that was covered by cardboard to keep the grasses from coming up, and helping it to mulch and add organic compost to the soil, and then adding a small two inch layer of fresh soil and organic mushroom compost I already had, mostly all in my backyard.
Then, I made a small rectangular partition with wooden boundary, and stuck some seeds of Swiss chard, and beet and manually watered them with my garden hose. The seeds geminated readily and started growing. Their lovely green large leaves changed the look of my front yard.
I also stuck a series of sunflower seeds… to sort of brighten up the place a bit and also to attract birds for the seeds.
Something else started happening the same time. Some tiny seeds of my vegetables, of previous harvests, somehow ended up in the transport of the soil from backyard to to the front. These included a few tiny potatoes that I did not notice while harvesting last year, an also some seeds of squash and pumpkin.
All these started sprouting when they got some splashes of water from my garden hose as I watered the Swiss chard, beet and sunflowers.
Uninvited they more or less filled out the rest of the space in my font yard, including sprouting plenty of cucubrita flowers attracting a new group of bees, and also ending up creating some squash and pumpkins, which are growing even now. The potato plants got as high as my hip and are flowering. So I guess I shall get some potato too.
And then there came this giant mushroom.
It came out of nowhere, right beside the bed of chards and beet. And it grew massive. Its stem was around two inches thick and the head was well over six inches when ball shaped. But in a day, it opened up, like unfurling of a sail, into a gigantic umbrella almost a foot wide.
I was more than surprised. I was actually curious to know if this was edible. I knew many mushrooms are toxic and can make me sick. I was no expert. So I did a few things.
I posted its pictures on Facebook, and asked if anybody could identify.
I googled to look for mushroom ID for coastal North America.
I ended up downloading an using a mushroom identification app.
And finally, I pinched off a tiny, tiny section of the edge of the umbrella and put it straight in my mouth, to check if my tongue protested. It tasted sort of nice and not toxic at all. Then I ate that small piece up to see if my stomach might protest. It did not.
At the end of all these efforts and attempt to ID it, it turned out a common, popular and edible mushroom of these parts, called Agaricus augustus.
So I uprooted it, an brought it indoor to my kitchen.
My wife was not too fond of eating mushrooms. So I decided to cook it and have it myself. I had no clue how to cook a mushroom. So I just steamed it for 15 minutes. It was way too big to fit into the steamer in one piece. So I chopped it up in pieces first. The frilled umbrella on the underside turned from off white to pitch black while steamed. The rest of the mushroom remained off white.
I added nothing more than a pinch of salt and pepper and then tried it with a fork. It tasted vaguely like a medium rare beef steak, and quite filling. In fact, this mushroom by itself filled me up like a full meal for an adult.
Well, now I know how to identify an Agaricus augustus mushroom, and at least how to cook it by steaming, and that it is a great wild food. Next time I find another, I am going to be fancy in my cooking.
One of the side effects of growing food in your backyard is that your garden becomes alive. If you are growing organic and do not use any industrial poison in way of insecticide, herbicide, fungicide or any other of the “cides”, you are helping to preserve the small creatures at the bottom of the food chain, from the soil microbes and worms to hordes of butterflies and insects that crawl, leap or fly about as your neighbours. And if you do not mow your lawn constantly to prevent wild flowers to bloom, and let the grass grow long before each mow, you allow a whole lot more of food for even larger animals such as rabbits and hares.
Along with all these creatures, come the creatures up the food chain that like to feast of these. You get a look-see and overhead flyby or perching on nearby tall trees by birds of prey like hawks and eagles that notice the frequency of rabbits and hares visiting your garden, primarily to eat the flowers and long leaves of the wild dandelions.
Meanwhile, the profusion of flowers – from large orange bright ones from the pumpkins and squash, to tiny ones on some cilantro plants that I am allowing to produce seeds for the next season growing season – attract a huge horde or insects, from crawling ants to all kinds of flying insects from multiple types of bee to various kinds of butterflies.
Then there are insects that also like to eat at the ripping fruits around the garden – from crab apples to cherries plums and figs. These fruits will also attract fruit eating birds.
This profusion of insects in turn attract an unbelievable variety of eight legged spiders that make their webs in critical locations, hoping to snack on the profusion of these flying meals. Most insects have six legs and two antenna, while spiders belong to a different group of joint legged invertebrates called arachnids, and are grouped with scorpions, ticks, and mites. They all have eight legs. The thing is, many of these spider like creatures are also in loose soil, and often comeappear when I dig into them with my fingers to check it. They come up, along with centipede and millipede, and immediately get busy trying to bury themselves back in dry loose soil. Worms on the other hand, will prefer wet or moist soil. All these, too, are meals for other creatures, such as birds.
Chickadee
And thus come the insect eating birds, who will go for both the flying insets as well as insect catchers like the spiders.
Most of us know of birds like chickadee and hummingbirds. We think chickadees eat seeds and hummingbirds feed on flower nectars. True. But these birds are also prolific insect eaters. Therefore, they are constantly on the move in the garden, often in large numbers, looking for a more mobile form of meals compared to honey.
Rufous hummingbird
Then there are the wrens, tiny group of perching birds that are insect eaters and known for taking a special liking to spiders. One of these shy birds, called Bewick’s wren, have been making nests in or near my garden and raising chicks successfully year upon year. That is one reason I have a few bird boxes placed in my backyard, often used by small birds to make their nests.
Bewick’s wren
Two hummingbirds are common sights in British Columbia. One is the resident one that has evolved to survive the high latitude winters. This is the Anna’s hummingbird. The other, also highly visible in the warmer months, is a summer visitor from south of the border. This one is the rufous hummingbird. In many ways, they look similar. Both are same size and more or less same shape, and look greenish from the back.
The main difference by which one can distinguish one from the other, is that the Anna’s hummingbird has absolutely no rufous – brick colour – anywhere on them, while the rufous hummingbird has on its sides and even belly. There are other subtle differences that one might miss – such as spots of white around the eyes of the Anna’s and the fact that, I think, the Anna’s hummingbird’s beak has the hint of a slightly downwards droop. The rufous, in my view, has a dead straight beak, like a fencing sword.
Anyhow, both of them will take insects. Also, there are many flowers that they like to poke at and sip from. Further, most of us have a few hummingbird feeders hanging around. So hummingbirds are here. They are usually not scared of humans. At times, one comes within a food of my face, hovers in the air for a second or two, to take a close look at the red coloured emblem on my cap, just to figure out if it is a flower or not. Convinced it is not a flower, it flies away. Usually they are too close and too sudden for me to click a picture so close to me. Perhaps one day I will get one.
Male Anna’s hummingbird displaying georgette
Hummingbirds have two kinds of coloured feathers. Some are fast colours and others have structural colour. What is fast colour and what is structural colour. Well, we all know what is fast colour. That is colour on our fabric or paper that are not water soluble and will not wash away. The colour is there to stay.
Structural colour is something else. They are largely made of feathers that have colourless transparent parts, which, when flexed at the correct fashion by the bird and the lighting is good, what happens is that sunlight refracts internally, splits up like when passing through a prism, and only some selective colours end up reaching the eyes of the observer. These are structural colours. They appear to have a hue, and in some cases the colours can even change depending on angle of view, giving the feathers appear iridescent.
The male hummingbirds, both Anna’s and Rufous, have special feathers at its throat that they can flare up in a way where they look like shimmering pink, for an Anna’s, or more brighter red for a Rufous hummingbird. These throat feathers for the males are display feathers, for impressing potential females. These are called Georgettes. The same feathers, when not flexed, and kept tucked in, appear blackish and dull. The bird can control the colours of their georgette as and when needed.
Violet Green Swallow
And we should not forget the swallows, such as the colourful violet green swallow, which is also an insect eater.
These are the creatures that make my garden a living garden, and part of the reason is that I grow food without poison, and let the grass grow taller and weeds make flowers instead of constantly mowing them. When the grass grows tall enough, I mow it in one shot and the huge amount of grass mulch is then used as bedding for some vegetable patch, to be composted and returned back to the soil by microbes. All this, in turn, helps to keep the garden alive.
This year I seem to have a huge success in growing the general Cucubrita family of food crops. Although the season is in its early phase and the produce are not yet ripe, it appears that I shall probably have a successful harvest of pumpkins, squash, zucchini, gourd and cucumbers than any previous year.
I planted a lot of seeds in my starter pots. Most of them sprouted and were successfully transplanted outdoors. I had been careful to manually water the plants, both in raised beds and on portable fabric bags. The main difference in the raised beds were that the lower levels were fulled with wood, leaves and grass mulch, with the upper layer being soil – following the hugelkultur technique. Actually, I did not know of hugelcutur when I started doing it out of my own belief that this might work. And then, based on my pictures posted on social media, I got responses that showed that my efforts were already practiced long before and had a name – originating from Germany.
In more than one way, the Cucubrita family has contributed to my backyard turning into a food forest. The other major contributors are potato, tomato and the cabbage and cauliflower groups.
I am aware that the Cucubrita family of squash, gourd, zucchini and especially pumpkin are rich in vitamins, primarily vitamin-A. Also, the greens of these plants are great as food, either sautéed western style or cooked like saag Indian style.
I have not had any of these greens yet, but that is to come. As soon as a large pumpkin or two begin to grow on a vine, one can in effect cut off the remaining vine and leaves and cook them, while letting the pumpkins grow and the plant put more energy into them instead of into growing more vine.
Pumpkin on the ground
Pumpkin in the air
Pumpkin on the roof
I did not count how many plants I have put in the soil in my backyard, but there are perhaps a hundred vines, some are branches of the main, growing in all directions and are literally taking over the neighbourhood.
I can already count at least 8 pumpkin growing on the very roof of my garden shed, along with half as many squash. But these are merely preliminary figures. The vines are growing on the roof like crazy, and many more are claiming to the roof. Some are producing fruits hanging off the edge of the roof. So no telling how many will be linked to this one small garden shed roof alone. It is perhaps not an exaggerated expectation to state that I expect the total number of pumpkin, gourd and squash on my property this year might cross 50. In other words, if I was to eat one of them each week, it will cover the whole year.
At least half a dozen of the vines are happy to be climbing the red leaf cherry blossom tree nearby one of the hugelcultur raised beds.
Squash on a cherry blossom tree
As to the vines, there are perhaps a hundred of them growing everywhere. And this does not even include the cucumbers, which by themselves might produce almost 50 fruits.
I am kept busy daily, trying to help the vines find something to climb. I have criss cross the area is ropes and strings for these vines to climb, wrap around, or hand from.
About the pumpkins and squash, there is also a story to be told involving the front yard.
I had prepared part of the smaller front yard, removing the grass, covering the area with biodegradable cardboard to suppress the weeds, and brought some soil from my backyard, mixed with compost and placed it over the cardboards last year, to try to grow some food instead of just a toxic grass lawn that supports nothing. I wanted it to either go to weed which supports insects, bee, rabbits, birds and other wildlife, or grow food. For purpose of appearance, I chose to grow food. I had planted some beets last year.
This year, I added some wooden frames there to demarcate food zones for different crops and flowers there, and planted some Swiss chard and beets in one of the rectangles, and a dozen sunflowers on another. A large section was left for planting more food. I was thinking of putting some more turnips and perhaps carrots there.
However, a strange thing happened when I started watering the beets, Swiss chards and the sunflowers. The water droplets also fell a bit on the sup pounding area that had the good soil but where I had not yet put any seeds. Apparently, the soil transported from my backyard, from beds where I had grown stuff in previous years, carried some tiny potatoes the size of half a marble or so that often escapes attention, but are still viable, despite their small size. Also, somehow the soil contained a few pumpkin and swash seeds, no idea how.
So, in my front yard, suddenly some potato, squash and pumpkins sprouted, next to the planted beets and chard.
I was surprised, but did not uproot them. If they could be hardy enough to emerge in my front yard unplanned by me, they deserved to live, I thought.
And now they have taken over the vacant wood framed plot. One of the vines have grown on the soil and looking for something to climb. I am thinking of making them a ramp and scaffolding of wood. But I have to first do some wood work to provide support for the second tomato zone where the plants are outgrowing the bamboo support sticks.
Meanwhile, I am thrilled to watch my Cucubrita grow. This might just be the year of the Cucubrita, for me.
I have been growing potato for a while now. However, this year I noticed something different in some of my crop. For one thing, many more of the plants produced potato berries, or seed pods, than before. But that was not all.
One potato plant had a most peculiar development. IT was producing potatoes above ground, one at every segment where new leaves or a new branch come out. There, at the juncture, a fat round thing grew, almost like a tumour or something. A closer look proved it to be a sort of a potato, growing above ground and off the stalk itself. As it a tuber is being turned Ito a fruit.
Well, one could not call this a fruit since a fruit is to be the container for seed. This guy was not involved in producing seed pods. Rather, it was producing potatoes, but above ground. I had plucked a few larger ones and taken a good look at them. They showed faint signs of turning greenish on the skin – a trait that normal potato have, if they are exposed to the sun. This is the potato way to prevent animals trying to eat the exposed potato, but turning toxic. A half exposed potato will turn green on the exposed section, and remain normal for the bottom half.
Also, at the top end of this thing, there were clear signs of new leaves sprouting. It was, indeed, trying to create a plant, just like a normal potato. Unlike a normal potato, it did not have roots in the ground, taking nourishment. It was taking it directly from the plant itself, through its attachment with the stalk. I did see, however, some tiny thread like extensions from the bottom, a millimetre or two in length. I wondered if those were left over traits of the normal potato, seeing down roots, looking for soil.
A few of these were already attacked by some insect and the top section partially chewed off, the best I could tell.
I wondered if this is how evolution works and if I was seeing an example of it. This is a variant of the normal potato. Somehow it came to existence. We know five kids of the same parents will not be clones but will have variations, some of which will be different from either parent or any of its ancestor. This variant trait, if proven to have some clear advantage, then in natural circumstance that offspring would do better than others and might end up producing more kids with this trait. Eventually, if circumstance remains favourable, this trait might become one of the dominant features of a new group of plants that are substantially different from its ancestors. This variant is now on the way to become a new species.
Natural selection aside, this can also happen through personal involvement of a group of creatures, such as animals that prefer a certain trait in themselves or in other plants or animals it supports and nurtures. Humans themselves have managed to bring forward plants very different today, from the earlier versions they favoured and tended for over the millennia. This involves plants as well as animals that are now domesticated and a far cry from their original wild version.
I was clearing out this bed, to prepare it for fall planting of other tubers – beet, turnip and perhaps carrots. So I was uprooting and harvesting the potato. About this particular plant, I had already pulled off a few of the above ground potato attached to it, taken a look and buried them back in the soil. I have a habit of burying back organic matter that I grew but do not consume. The plants themselves are usually crushed, balled up and reburied in the same soil. It came from nutrients off the ground, and goes back in the ground, to be composted back by micro organisms – the natural recycling that the living plant is so good at.
Thus, I pulled this plant off too and reburied it, but I remembered at the last moment to take a few pictures to preserve the occasion. I checked if it had also produced tubers underground and if so, how many. Apparently it did produce underground regular tubes too, but not too many. So it was a halfway transient variant, able to produce tubers both underground and above ground, but not too many nor too large anywhere.
It came upon me to write about it the next day. To me, this is evolution at work. This is what mutation, natural variation and random change means – as observed by early stalwarts like Charles Darwin in vast varieties of living creatures and how Gregor Mendel figured out how heredity works in green pea. If this trait in the potato, of growing tubers above ground, is to be considered an advantage, then humans could replant the produce of this plant again and again, selectively filtering out those that produced more tubers underground, and filtering in those that grew more above ground. Eventually, it might lead to potatoes that only grew above ground, and, hopefully, were good to eat too – a novelty.
I was not involved in trying to create any specific hybrids. Not in this late stage of my life, as a home gardener trying to produce my own food.
But I am an observer – with a habit of analysing what I see around me, and make sense of it. And thus, I decided to jot down my observation, while having today’s morning coffee.
thought of including Darwin’s image in the same blog. After all, I did find something of him in my own backyard garden, even if I am completely unaware of him ever finding evidence of any evolutionary change of this kind in potato.
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